Carl Jung's religious beliefs were based largely on personal experience, in spite of his introduction to organized religion in his childhood. Therefore, when he offers an interpretation and analysis of his patient's dream, Jung endows each symbol and fantasy with meaning. In his writing, Jung explains his perception of the collective unconscious as well as his belief in the meaningfulness of human imagination or fantasy. Jung notices that the doctor in the dream symbolized a god, a person endowed with
             superhuman characteristics. This causes Jung to speculate about the
             religious instinct, or the "longing for god." Jung's rhetorical questions
             in the excerpt from his book The Personal and the Collective Unconscious
             spark a myriad of questions of my own regarding the nature of religion.
             While I have not had momentous dreams or strong religious beliefs, I do
             feel that the instinct toward religion is a natural part of the human
             Jung states that he is convinced that there is "some purposive
             meaning" in the patient's dreams and Jung wonders whether that meaning is
             inherently spiritual or merely psychological. Jung sees in his patient's
             dream an archetype of a god, or at least a powerful being. However, the
             psychologist also wonders whether the figure of the doctor in the dream is
             simply a phenomenon called transference, in which the patient elevates the
             status of the doctor to that of a god. To the patient, a doctor is a type
             of god because he appears to be wiser and smarter than the patient, who
             Whether an example of transference or of religious instinct, the dream
             shows that the unconscious mind works with an entirely different language
             than the conscious mind. The conscious mind, according to Jung, tends
             toward criticism; the conscious mind is mundane and sees no real meaning in
             symbols. On the other hand, the unconscious taps into primordial realities
             and perhaps spiritual truths by using...